


In All the Tongues of Men and Angels

by coinin



Series: A Home's Heart Is the Kitchen [1]
Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Cooking, Domestic, M/M, Meet the Family, Religious Content, Team Tasty Nomz, food is love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-11 03:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/474258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coinin/pseuds/coinin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cougar goes home, goes on a road trip, and learns to cook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Faith

**Author's Note:**

> This story makes allusion to several Biblical passages. If you're not familiar with the Bible, it may help to read [1 Corinthians 13](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=NIV) (here's the same passage from the [King James Version](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=KJV), for those who want a little more poetry), as well as [Mark 14:29-31](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2014:29-31&version=NIV) and [Mark 14:66-72](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2014:66-72&version=NIV). They're short, I assure you. Also, if you're foggy on the Ten Commandments, [here they are](http://godstenlaws.com/ten-commandments/index.html#.UBjBLbTinMM). According to Catholic doctrine (and greatly condensed here for simplicity's sake) a venial sin is a minor sin that merely damages the soul, while a mortal sin is a 'grave' sin that severs a person's link to God and consigns their soul to Hell after death. Breaking any one of the Commandments would usually be considered a mortal sin. One can still seek and receive forgiveness after committing a mortal sin. Finally, [the Twenty-third Psalm](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+23&version=KJV).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Faith: trust in the honesty and truth of another, such as one's grandmother.

Cougar hasn't talked to any of his family in years.

He assumes they were informed when he 'died', and if they pay attention to the news, they might know the reports of his death were entirely falsified. He hasn't bothered to check.

\---

Jensen leaves on a Tuesday, hitching a ride with Pooch – they're both off to their families, and though Jensen offers Cougar a room at his sister's, Cougar declines. Jensen's disappointment is more real than feigned, and for just a second, Cougar wavers. It's for the best, though, and he made that decision weeks ago, standing with the others over Max's dead body.

“Well, Losers,” Clay had said, “looks like it's time to go home,” and just for a moment, Cougar felt like he had come unmoored in time.

Jensen leaves on a Tuesday, and Cougar watches until he can't see them any more, standing by the window of his government-assigned bedroom.

For the first time in his adult life, Cougar has no idea what comes next.

\---

Four in the morning on Thursday, the smartphone that Jensen had absolutely insisted Cougar purchase emits an irritatingly cheerful series of chirps.

Cougar is awake – has been for hours now, watching the lights of the cars going by outside, and not thinking about much. When he looks at the phone, he finds an email from Jensen; nothing more than a Youtube link and instructions to watch it or suffer Jensen's wrath. 

The video is some local newscast from San Diego. It's a shock when the camera pans sideways from the announcer, and there are Cougar's parents, his younger brother Ramón – taller than their father, now, and wearing a police officer's uniform, when the last time Cougar saw him Ramón had been an awkward middle schooler – and his grandmother Alvarez, tiny and stooped. The reporter is asking something about how it feels to find out their son is still alive, and that he's a hero; Cougar doesn't listen. His parents reply in awkward platitudes, and Ramón just looks solemn, standing rock-steady as their grandmother leans on his arm. 

When the reporter turns to Ramón, he says only, “I've always been proud of my brother,” and won't elaborate.

“And you, ma'am,” the reporter continues, holding the microphone out to grandma Alvarez, “do you have anything to add?”

The old woman straightens a little, looks directly at the camera, and says in the tone that means she expects to be obeyed, “Carlos. It's time you came home.”

And so Cougar does.

\---

Getting to San Diego isn't hard – Cougar hitches a ride on a cargo flight to Coronado. The pilot is one of Pooch's old buddies, says he's happy to help out a buddy of his buddy. Cougar smiles, thanks him, and spends the flight staring into space, thinking.

The day of his eighteenth birthday, Cougar – then Carlos – had driven down to the Army recruiting office and signed up. He had waited until the middle of family dinner to tell his parents. The resulting explosion had been the most dramatic argument ever witnessed at the Alvarez table, and there had been many. Looking back on it, Cougar knew it had been childish to so bait his parents, but Carlos had smiled in exultant satisfaction, slammed his chair back from the table (leaving the table before dinner was not done; another small crime heaped upon larger disappointments) and walked out the door, glad to have an excuse to leave.

Carlos Alvarez, first son after three daughters, was not supposed to join the Army. Carlos Alvarez was supposed to go to college, major in something useful like business or civil engineering, graduate with honors, marry a nice Catholic girl, and provide his parents with grandchildren while establishing himself in a respectable field of employment. Unfortunately for his parents, Carlos Alvarez was of the opinion that the suburban American ideal could go fuck itself. 

The idea of four more years of school made him want to scream, working in an office seemed like a minor hell, and even at eighteen, he knew that 'nice' was one of the last things he wanted in a mate. The joke was on Cougar, though – four years after enlisting, he was back in school on the military's dime, having realized he wanted to advance further than he could on a high school diploma. He had worked with the single-minded determination of an adult stuck in the college bubble, graduating _magna cum laude_ in three years with a double major in Military History and Chicano Literature, a feat that was made possible by his willingness to regularly overload with twenty-six units a quarter, as well as foregoing sleep and a social life in favor of getting out as fast as possible.

The last time Cougar had seen his family had been two years after his enlistment, at his second-oldest sister's wedding. They had avoided another screaming argument only because Cougar had decided before he arrived that he didn't want to be the black sheep brother who ruined his sister's big day – Marisol had never done anything to earn his enmity – and so had refused to rise to any of the many pointed comments thrown his way before and after the ceremony.

And now... Here he was, come to the bad end his father had predicted: mid-way through his thirties, no job skills to speak of, hoping for a general discharge, and neither married nor likely to be. The military psychologists had asked Cougar how he felt about returning to civilian life, and Cougar had shrugged, invented some answer about feeling optimistic. The truth was, he didn't feel much of anything. When they had killed Max, he had expected to feel relief or joy, but instead he had been overwhelmed by crushing numbness. 

He gets a hotel room for his first night in San Diego, sleeps in restless two-hour increments. The next morning he rents a car – some mid-nineties Mitsubishi with the turning radius of a boat – and heads out to the house his family used to live in. It's only when he's halfway there that he realizes they might have moved, but when he pulls up to the curb, he's reassured to see “Alvarez” painted on the mailbox. The house looks empty – lived in, not vacant, but with that indefinable air of a house with no one at home, and there's no car in the driveway. Cougar rings the doorbell anyway, gets no response, and knocks just in case. He looks at the mailbox, briefly considers checking it to see if he can figure out who is still living at home, but discards that idea: there's a woman gardening in the next yard over, probably about Cougar's mother's age, and she keeps casting suspicious looks his way. Cougar tips his hat to her as he turns to leave, since it never hurts to be polite. He'll try again on the weekend, when there will be a better chance of catching someone at home.

“Are you the oldest Alvarez boy?” The woman asks before Carlos can quite turn away, stopping him where he's standing awkwardly on the steps of his old family home, the home he never lived in – they moved after he enlisted, just before his sister got married.

“Yes,” Cougar answers, because it's the truth, and then adds, “Carlos Alvarez,” because it seems polite.

“Emelia Sierra,” the woman replies. She makes a a considering noise, and looks at him. Cougar has a feeling he's being judged. He also has a feeling this woman knows all the gossip, and will be reporting this encounter back to his own mother in minute detail.

“Well,” Sierra says after a long pause, pulling off her gardening gloves and dropping them into her basket, “home at last.” 

“My grandmother asked,” Cougar replies, even though Sierra had made a statement, not asked a question. There's a shade of bitterness in his voice that surprises him, and he wonders if she heard it too.

“Oh, Señora Alvarez?” Sierra asks, in the tones of someone filing that bit of information away for later use. “She doesn't live here anymore, didn't you know?” At Cougar's blank stare, she clucks and shakes her head. “They moved her into a home,” Sierra continues confidingly, leaning over the fence that divides the two yards and motioning for Cougar to come closer. “You don't do that, not to family, that's what I said, but nothing else would do. Now, you go visit her – I have the address inside, just you wait.”

Cougar does wait, and thanks the woman when she returns with a glossy pamphlet advertising a senior living facility.

\---

The first thing Cougar thinks when he sees his grandmother is that she's shrunk, become tiny and frail.

The first thing she says is, “Carlos! You've grown!”

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective, Cougar thinks as she drops her crocheting and pulls herself up to give him a hug. It's strange, to hold her stooped shoulders and realize that she fits under his chin with inches to spare.

“Now let me look at you,” she says a moment later, pulling a tissue from her sleeve and dabbing at eyes gone bright and damp. “Off with that hat,” she continues, and Cougar complies, smiling because her spirit is unchanged, still fierce and imperious. This is the woman who, after her husband died, raised six children on her own. “Look at you, grown up all handsome just like your grandfather. You break all the girl's hearts, yes?” Cougar shrugs, grinning, and his grandmother chuckles. “Don't you try your charm on me, boy! You Alvarez men are all the same – handsome, and don't you know it, flirting your way through life until that one comes along and hits you right in your heart.” She jabs Cougar in the sternum to punctuate her statement, and he grunts. Her fingers are bony, and her words hit a little too close to home.

“If you say so, Grandmother,” he says, and lets himself be seated on ottoman across from her chair. It feels like his childhood again, seated by her feet as she holds court, her throne an old wing-back armchair.

After they're both seated she looks at him for a long, searching, moment. Cougar tries to smile convincingly, but she sighs.

“Oh, _mi'jo_ , you used to be so small,” she says, and shakes her head. “The years have not been kind to you, have they?”

Cougar shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about his life with anyone. He wants to leave it behind, all the mistakes and tragedies, the nightmares and missed chances. Especially the missed chances - they taunt him in the long, sleepless hours when his mind seizes on one of his many failures, and he can do nothing but analyze every way he could have done better.

His grandmother must see his reluctance, because she switches the topic to his family, and everything that has happened in his absence. Cougar is just coming to terms with the fact that he has a niece the same age as Jensen's niece – Marisol's daughter, the oldest of two children, currently obsessed with horses – when there's a knock at the door.

“Oh, that will be Ramón and Ji Young,” Señora Alvarez says happily, and Cougar is caught flat-footed and unaware, uncomfortably reminded that his grandmother is absolutely not adverse to scheming to get her way.

Cougar is on his feet when Ramón opens the door and stops in the doorway, staring, his expression something between confusion and hope.

“Carlos?” Ramón asks. There's hope in his voice, too.

Cougar nods, his throat too tight to do anything else, especially when Ramón smiles, walks across the room, and hugs Cougar. Cougar hugs him back, until they're both clinging to each other as though the alternative is to drown. It's only when Cougar puts his hands on his brother's shoulders and steps back that he realizes he has to look up to look Ramón in the eye.

“You're _taller_ ,” Cougar says, too shocked to monitor the words coming out of his mouth.

Ramón snorts, then starts to chuckle. This time when they hug, they're laughing and crying both.

“This is my fiancee, Ji Young,” Ramón says when they're done and the tears have been surreptitiously wiped away. Ji Young steps forward, a slight Asian woman who holds herself with an appealing sort of quiet strength. She reminds Cougar of some of the military wives he has met, and he approves.

They shake hands and exchange pleasantries, Cougar still trying to work his head around his baby brother not only being taller than him, but engaged. A few minutes later, Ramón catches Cougar's eye and tips his chin toward the door. Cougar nods, and they leave Señora Alvarez and Ji Young discussing wedding plans.

“It's good having you back,” Ramón says when the door has been firmly shut and they're standing on the tiny balcony outside the apartment. Cougar looks away, and Ramón hastens to add, “even if it's not for long.”

They stand in silence, seconds passing into minutes. Cougar wonders if he should say something, but what is there to say? He's not sorry for leaving, he won't lie about that, and he still isn't sure coming back was the right decision either.

It's Ramón who breaks the silence. “Grandmother has cancer. She won't tell you, of course. She only told us after she decided to refuse treatment. It's inoperable,” he adds after a moment's pause.

“How long?” Cougar asks, when he can speak. It's not what he wants to say, but since what he wants is to scream and shoot something, it will do. 

“Six months, maybe a year. The doctors say she is healthy for her age, but...” Ramón lets the words _she is old_ go unspoken. “Grandmother wants to go back home to die,” he continues, and Cougar knows that to his grandmother 'home' means Mexico, “but Dad... Well, you know how he is. I would go with her, but-” Ramón leans forward, rests his hands on the railing and lets his head drop. But Ramón is planning his wedding (or at least standing by while it is being planned) and has a job, Cougar supplies. 

They are interrupted by Ji Young tapping on the glass door. 

“Grandmother is insisting we all have dinner together,” she says with a wry little smile. “She's arguing with your parents now, and Marisol already agreed to come.”

Ramón groans. “Jesús, she never does anything slow. Thanks for the warning. Do we need to do anything? What are we doing for food?”

“She said something about the housekeeper and tamales, but then she got your father on the phone. We should check the kitchen.”

Señora Alvarez has a little apartment at the senior living facility. The front door opens into a hallway that leads to the main living room. To the left is the bathroom and a half-screened bedroom area, and tucked off to the right is a tiny, closet-sized kitchen. Cougar waits in the doorway, listening with half an ear to his grandmother arguing with his father, and watching Ramón and Ji Young move around the kitchen, rattling through doors and staring into the refrigerator. There are tamales, enough to make part of a dinner, and a pot of beans, both brought by the housekeeper. Ji Young tells Ramón to make tortillas while she runs to the Korean grocery store, and by the time the rest of the family arrives, there's food – a little eclectic, with the tamales, beans, and tortillas supplemented by japchae, steamed dumplings, and a cucumber salad seasoned with chilies and sesame seeds, but plenty for everyone, and that, Grandmother Alvarez assures a slightly frazzled Ji Young, is what counts.

Marisol is the first to arrive, with her husband and their two children in tow. From the look of it, there's a third on the way. Cougar smiles, until Marisol pulls him into an awkward hug while berating him for not keeping in touch. Her husband Jesús, who Cougar has never particularly liked, does himself no favors when he tries to out-macho Cougar while shaking hands. Cougar keeps a pleasant smile on his face and squeezes until he can feel the bones in Jesús' hand grate together. It may be petty; Cougar doesn't care much either way. Cougar's niece and nephew are both polite but quiet, which he assumes is due to shyness. 

When Cougar's parents arrive, he hangs back, standing next to his grandmother's chair and watching. It's not fear, just caution: he has no idea what to expect. His father ignores him for as long as possible, making a show out of putting his suit jacket in the hall closet and hanging his pristine white straw hat on the opposite end of the coat rack from where Cougar had left his rather battered hat. He continues to ignore Cougar as he comes over to exchange greetings with Sra. Alvarez.

Cougar watches it all with a sense of mild detachment. His father, who must be approaching sixty-five, still looks mostly the same – more grey in his short hair, and a more substantial paunch are the only real changes. He is impeccably dressed, as always, in spotless black slacks, cream-colored dress shirt, turquoise studded bolo tie (Cougar _loathes_ bolo ties), and ostrich leather cowboy boots. It's the boots that catch Cougar's eye, and he stares at them for several long moments. Cougar is wearing worn-in jeans and a white t-shirt, and his own workboots are long overdue for a re-soling. There's as much blood as boot polish rubbed into the leather, and they have carried him across continents and through battlefields. Cougar's boots have earned their scuffs and scratches. His father's boots have very likely never faced anything wilder than an urban lawn, and that thought amuses Cougar so much he has to suppress a laugh, turning it into an unconvincing cough.

Cougar's father looks at him then, finally, the expression on his face a familiar one – disapproval and disappointment – and for once, Cougar doesn't care. There is not a scrap of contrition or guilt anywhere in him, and it feels good. He meets his father's gaze and smiles, while in the back of his mind, Jensen is doing a very bad Nancy Sinatra impression.

“Carlos,” his father says, holding out his hand.

“Diego,” Cougar replies, shaking the offered hand. Many heated words were exchanged over the dinner table, that night Carlos Alvarez left home; among those Cougar won't forget were his father shouting that Carlos was no son of his. From the look on his father's face, he too remembers.

“Mother,” Cougar continues, turning to the woman who has been hovering anxiously behind Diego. She wept over disowning him, but even with that, the title still feels strange on his tongue. He has been nobody's child for so long.

His mother – María – clutches Cougar's hands in hers, looking up at him and blinking back tears.

“You're home,” she says.

“I am back,” he replies, half reassurance and half repudiation, because this isn't Cougar's home. He doesn't have a home

Cougar is very glad when Ramón interrupts before their mother can say anything else, announcing that everyone should eat before the food gets cold. The dining table is barely big enough for four people, let alone eight adults and two children. Diego, María, Marisol, and Jesús take the table, while the kids make a game of sitting on cushions in front of the TV. Ramón and Ji Young sit on the couch, balancing plates on their knees and urging Cougar to join them. He ends up perching on the arm of the couch, while Sra. Alvarez surveys the room from her chair and graciously accepts the plate Ramón brings her.

During dinner, conversation switches to English, out of unspoken deference to Ji Young. She admits to Cougar that while she has been trying to learn Spanish, it has been slow going. 

“ _An nyeong haseo_ ,” Cougar says after a moment's thought, and when Ji Young quirks her head in confusion, he continues, “all the Korean I know. A friend-” and he has to pause, because he was on the verge of saying _A friend of Pooch_ , but that raises more question than it answers, so he continues awkwardly, “-of a friend tried to teach us. Learn Korean, get _soju_.” That makes Ji Young laugh, so Cougar keeps going. “He drove tanks. Made his crew listen to – I forget their name. Very popular in Korea.”

“Super Junior?” Ji Young offers tentatively.

Cougar nods.

“Oh my God. Really?”

Cougar nods again, grinning as Ji Young hides her face in her hands.

“But they're so _bad_ ,” she wails, and Cougar has to agree.

During dinner everyone sticks to safe topics, like what the children are doing in school, Diego's continued dissatisfaction with one of his employees, or the bridal store nearly losing one of the bridesmaids' dresses. When the dishes have been cleared away and the men have beers, there's a lull in the conversation. Ji Young glances around, reading the mood of the room, and cheerfully offers to take the children down to the little playground at the corner of the senior center, a proposition which is met with great enthusiasm. Cougar decides, at that moment, that he likes Ji Young – she's sensible, and shows good initiative in removing the children from what is definitely going to be an Alvarez family argument. Cougar can feel it in the tension in the room, the glances people keep throwing his way, and even his grandmother's pointed calm, like a declaration of intent.

“Diego,” Sra. Alvarez says into the quiet that follows Ji Young's departure, “I will be going back home after the wedding. We should start calling your sister and making arrangements.” She has slipped back into Spanish, and everyone else follows suit.

“Mother, we have talked about this. You know it isn't safe to go alone, and the hospitals here are better,” Diego replies, trying for conciliatory and coming across as patronizing, which is a common problem of his.

“We have also talked about how I will not be needing fancy hospitals,” Sra. Alvarez says tartly. “I am going home to die.”

“But it's not safe for you to go alone. Flying is so stressful, and driving would be so much time, so many days off the job. No, it wouldn't work.”

“I wouldn't want to trouble any of you,” she says with false humility, “but if there was someone who could take me...”

Cougar swallows back a smile, keeping his face perfectly blank, because his father doesn't stand a chance, and it is beautiful to see a master manipulator at work.

“Of course, then it would be different,” Diego says, magnanimous with the flush of his imagined triumph, as he steps right into the trap.

Cougar raises one hand. “I will.”

The rest of his family has been silent, watching the byplay between Diego and Sra. Alvarez, and now they turn to Cougar. Ramón is doing a bad job of hiding his grin, and the rest look surprised or suspicious, or in the case of his father, angry. Cougar keeps his expression blank, and shrugs.

“I could drive grandmother to México,” he says, and then adds as an apparent afterthought, “I would need a car.”

“One of the guys at the station has a truck he's trying to sell,” Ramón pipes up. He doesn't bother to look chastened when Diego glares at him.

“I know mother doesn't want to go to the hospital,” Diego says, trying a different tack, “But she will still need medicine. She should stay here, where they are trained for that sort of thing. Have you ever given an injection?” The last is directed to Cougar, and this time he doesn't bother trying to hid his smile.

“In the middle of a firefight,” he replies, and knows he has won.

“This is real cute,” Jesús says suddenly, and Cougar hadn't been counting on interference from that sector, which might have been a mistake, “but am I the only one that remembers he's a murderer? Sending grandma off with a child killer, what a great plan.”

There is dead silence. 

Cougar closes his eyes, and he can almost hear Jensen, almost hear the way he would say _Oh, that is so very not good_. Jensen would hold Cougar back from the fight while talking about hacking Jesús' credit card account to buy really embarrassing porn. But Jensen isn't there, so Cougar has to hold himself back. It's hard. It's _very_ hard, but Cougar manages to resist the urge to break his brother-in-law's face. This is why he should never have come back.

“You bastard,” Marisol hisses, breaking the silence. “Limp dick son of a whore, why did I ever marry you?”

Jesús looks taken aback, and then angry, but before he can say anything, Ramón steps up and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Think very carefully about what you say next,” Ramón says.

“Whatever,” Jesús says with an attempt at bravado. “Just keep him away from my kids.”

María gasps, and Marisol throws her car keys in her husband's face.

“Get out,” she says, livid. “Get out, and don't come home tonight. Get your friends to pick up your stuff.”

“But he's-” Jesús starts, and it's fascinating, the same way an accident is fascinating, to see him digging his own grave. 

“It doesn't matter, _you don't talk about family that way_ ,” Marisol shouts, and Jesús finally leaves, slamming the door on his way.

“Carlos,” Sra. Alvarez says after a moment of prickly silence, “did you kill those children?”

“No,” Cougar says, and forces himself to meet her eyes, even when his voice breaks. “I did not.”

Sra. Alvarez nods contentedly. “I didn't think so.”

\---

The wedding goes off with what Cougar assumes is a normal amount of chaos – he does his best to stay out of the way when he isn't needed to carry things or move furniture. Ji Young doesn't have a meltdown, all the bridesmaids have their dresses, and none of the groom's party show up to the wedding drunk, so Cougar counts it a success.

His grandmother insists Cougar sit in the family pew, so he does – paging through the wedding program (in Spanish, English, and Korean) to avoid being engaged in awkward small-talk with family members he hasn't seen in years. All of his sisters are in attendance; Ana, the oldest (who sits apart during the ceremony, and leaves directly after congratulating the newlyweds, though no one will tell Cougar why), Marisol, and Laura, who is only a year older than Cougar and caused a minor family scandal by quitting her job as a nurse to work for Planned Parenthood. Jesús is conspicuously absent.

Even before the wedding, Sra. Alvarez had been planning for her final trip to Mexico, and almost every family member leaves the reception with something she thought they should have. By the time Cougar comes to pick her up, driving his newly-acquired Ford F-150, his grandmother has pared her belongings down to as much will fit in a handbag and three cardboard boxes. She's positively cheerful about this change.

They leave on a Tuesday, and Cougar thinks it must have become a day for leave-taking.

\---

When the last decent radio station finally dissolves into a rush of static, Cougar reaches over and turn the radio off. The truck has a tape deck, but the only tape in the glove compartment is something that purports to be Garth Brooks, but is actually Queen. Cougar isn't that desperate for noise, not now, not ever. A few miles on, his grandmother looks up from her crocheting.

“How about a story?” She says coyly. “You must have got up to something interesting, all those years in the army.”

Cougar blinks, and thinks about it for a while. Sra. Alvarez waits patiently, which Cougar appreciates. 

Most of his stories are classified, or terribly inappropriate for telling to one's grandmother. And then Cougar remembers the boots.

So Cougar tells the story of Jensen and the Boots, as it will later be known. Once, when the team had been enjoying a week of well-deserved downtime, Jensen had lost a bet and had to polish everyone's boots. He had complained vociferously for half an hour, and then gone suspiciously silent. 

In retrospect, that really should have been their first warning. That night, after everyone else was asleep, Jensen had used fishing line and leftover chopsticks from Chinese takeout to turn the team's collected boots into marionettes.

And that was how the rest of the team had woken up to Jensen's noisy, off-key rendition of “These Boots Were made for Walking,” complete with walking boot puppets.

When Cougar finishes, his grandmother gives him a long, stern look.

“You are not joking?”

Cougar shakes his head.

“But _why_?” She asks, laughing helplessly.

“It's Jensen,” Cougar says, because why does Jensen do anything? 

After that, it becomes a thing. The radio stays off, and Cougar tells stories – carefully edited, of course, with names, places, and other sensitive information removed. He tells his grandmother about Jensen's ridiculous shirts, about Jensen and the Honduran General, about Jensen going ballistic at the referee during his niece’s soccer game – which requires a detour into the phenomenon that is Jensen And His Niece, with following scores online, and the time Jensen rescued a kitten in Afghanistan and, through a long, convoluted series of favors, had it delivered to his sister's doorstep by a very embarrassed Marine. Jensen's sister Rebecca had filmed the man's expression when six-year-old Sarah had launched herself at him, hugged him around the knees, and declared him the _best kitten deliverer EVER_. Even Clay had gotten a bit sniffly watching the footage, and had to go glare at a wall until he regained his composure.

Cougar doesn't just tell stories about Jensen – there's also sneaking Pooch in to see Jolene in the maternity ward, and the time Pooch showed up at a rendezvous point in a bright red Ferrari. Clay's many ill-advised romantic entanglements provide an afternoon of amusement.

He doesn't talk about Roque.

Still, it's Jensen Cougar talks about the most, which he doesn't really think about until his grandmother starts asking him to _tell another Jensen story_. By that time, well – it's probably too late to hide that he cares about Jensen the most, but Cougar still tones it down, and hopes his grandmother will write it off as friendship.

Cougar really doesn't want to have that conversation.

Cougar should also really know better than to hope his grandmother will miss anything.

\---

They spend three nights with Cougar's Aunt Luz and her husband. The last time Cougar saw Luz had been at Marisol's quinceañera, when Cougar was ten. Luz laughs when Sra. Alvarez introduces them, tells Cougar she would not have recognized him, and bundles them both into the house for the best dinner Cougar has eaten in a long, long time.

Luz fills up the space around her quiet husband with bustle and chatter. Cougar finds himself retreating into silence in response. Her noise is kind, but overwhelming, and compounded by her constant attempts to mother Cougar – has he had enough to eat? Have another serving, young men should eat up. (Cougar wonders just how young she thinks he is.) The mothering culminates with Luz inviting over several of her friends, all of whom conveniently have young, single daughters.

Cougar jams his hat on his head and goes for a very long walk.

“Luz never had any sons,” Sra. Alvarez says the next day, after they have made their goodbyes and are leaving the city behind. She isn't looking at Cougar, apparently intent on finding her crochet hook in the fluffy mass of half-finished afghan blanket.

Cougar makes a noise of acknowledgment and keeps his eyes on the road. His grandmother is after something, and he doesn't feel like making it any easier for her.

“They were nice girls,” she says blandly.

“I am not a nice man,” Cougar replies.

His grandmother tuts in response, and holds her crochet up, inspecting it critically. The blanket is violently colorful, a veritable assault on the eyes – the squares neon pink and lime green starbursts. Cougar thinks it is hideous, but he keeps his opinions to himself. 

“How about another Jensen story?” His grandmother suggests slyly.

Cougar thinks about it, and starts in on the time Jensen and Pooch got drunk and bored, in that order, and ended up reprogramming every road construction sign in the Fort Hood area to warn for zombies.

\---

The road trip's ultimate destination is the hacienda that had once belonged to Sra. Alvarez's father, and is now mostly empty. An elderly couple, María and Raoul, both nearly as old as Sra. Alvarez herself, are the sole remaining inhabitants. They live in one wing of the old house and act as caretakers; Raoul tending his garden and María raising chickens with great devotion.

Cougar half expects the place to be full of ghosts, literal or figurative. Generations of his grandmother's family have lived and died here, and now Sra. Alvarez – her father's only child, a daughter, and the last of her line – has come home to do the same. Houses that have seen history and now lie vacant, silent but for the voices of memory, inhabited only by mice and bugs – such houses possess a singular sorrow, something nearly tangible to those who step inside.

Instead, the hacienda is peaceful. Four human inhabitants do little to dispel the emptiness, but there are swallows under the eaves, and half-feral cats have made the old stables their kingdom. Raoul's ancient mutt spends most of his days lying in a sunny patch of dirt by the kitchen door, where he can keep an ear cocked for the sounds of cooking and beg patiently for scraps. Not to be forgotten, there are the chickens. The chickens scratch in the yard, ignoring the dog and fleeing the cats, wandering into the house and getting underfoot. Cougar leaves the window in his room open the first night, and wakes up with three plump hens sleeping around his feet.

The first few days are a bustle of activity; opening up rooms, rearranging furniture, airing out bedding, and settling in. After that – nothing. The days pass slowly, at a pace which seems calculated to drive Cougar mad with boredom. Cougar can sit silent and still for hours, even days, if he has an objective, but this aimless inactivity is not to his liking. Sra. Alvarez seems content to sit in the great oaken chair Cougar dragged out to the porch for her, crocheting or reading or just watching the yard.

Cougar learn to occupy himself – mostly fixing things around the place, tasks that escaped the caretakers. He knows he isn't very good at it, really, but it is unexpectedly satisfying to step back after hours spent re-hanging a gate or fixing a fence and realize that he has _made_ something. So Cougar persists in his repair efforts, and day by day he improves. He still can't drive a nail like Raoul, in two strikes of the hammer – one to set the nail, the second to drive it home – but Cougar finds himself bending fewer nails, and hitting his own fingers much less frequently. And he does slow down, let go, learn to breathe freely – when it takes half an afternoon to find a saw, and when finally unearthed, the saw is missing half its teeth, Cougar only shrugs and goes to ask Raoul about how one goes about sharpening a saw.

In the evenings, Sra. Alvarez settles into her chair on the porch and Cougar lounges on the steps. They sit in silence as often as not, Sra Alvarez crocheting until the day's last light is lost, while Cougar amuses himself with whatever task he's concocted to keep his hands busy. He starts by resolving to sharpen every cutting edge in the house, which turns out to be a good move, politically – the two days it takes for Cougar to hone María's kitchen knives to razor sharpness earn him a permanent place in her good graces.

One such evening, Sra. Alvarez sets down her crochet (having finished the squares, she is now putting them together with electric blue borders in between) and waits while Cougar finishes up with the firewood hatchet. He runs his thumb across the blade, grunts in satisfaction, and leaves the hatchet buried in the edge of the chopping block. His grandmother is watching Cougar with a thoughtful expression when he sits back down and stretches out, one leg on the step, his back to the railing. He cocks an eyebrow at her.

“Your Jake,” she says carefully, “you love him?”

Every shred of hard-won serenity deserts Cougar in an instant, but the lie rolls well-practiced off his tongue.

“No.”

Sra. Alvarez looks unconvinced, but Cougar meets her eyes and refuses to look away. To do so is to admit guilt. No matter that his stomach is tying itself in knots; Cougar keeps his face a perfect mask of skepticism seasoned with false anger.

“You speak fondly of him,” she says, finally. “I have heard men speak of their wives with less fondness.” She snorts, an unladylike noise of disgust. “Many men, with far less fondness.”

“He was my teammate,” Cougar says, working to achieve just the right note of injured machismo, “nothing more.”

Sra. Alvarez looks away first. Silence falls, but Cougar can't relax. If it had been just about anyone else, Cougar would have punched them by now - not because was insulted by the implication that he was in love with a man, but because Cougar knew most people would expect him to be, and far too often fulfilling those expectations was the price that must be paid for protecting not only himself but Jensen, too.

On the other side of the yard, María's perpetually confused rooster hopped up on a stump and began to crow to the setting sun.

“Would you deny him three times?” Sra. Alvarez says over the noise, and when Cougar looks up, she is staring at him, eyes stern.

The rooster ceases crowing, and in the silence that follows, Cougar realizes he can't lie, can't make that mistake.

He looks away, and the little rooster once again stretches out to the sunset sky and begins to crow.

“You do love him,” she says in tones of surprise. Cougar wonders idly how long it will take before that surprise turns to disgust and anger.

“Yes,” Cougar replies, after a long pause. He is helpless to fight the breathless dread rising in his chest, because he knows how this conversation goes, and he's already planning escape routes in his head. The laundry on the line will have to be abandoned – too much trouble to get those, when he can just grab what's in his room, take his wallet and the truck and head for the border. He can call Luz from a payphone, have her pick up Sra. Alvarez, so the old woman isn't alone-

“I am glad,” his grandmother says, the words so unexpected they derail Cougar's thoughts completely.

“What?”

“Twenty years ago,” she says thoughtfully, “I would have thrown you out of the house. Prayed for my soul, maybe. Ten years ago, I would have cried, I think. Prayed for you.” She sighs and shakes her head. “Oh Carlos, _mi'jo_ , there are so many terrible things in this world. I have seen some of them, and I can't think – I look at everything, and I cannot see how love can be a sin. It is love?” She adds suddenly. “You respect him?”

Cougar nods, too dumbfounded to do anything else.

“Good. And he respects you?”

Cougar blinks. “He-” he starts, then shakes his head. “We were teammates,” he repeats. “Nothing more.” He feels as though he is caught in some strange, surreal version of the world, where nothing happens as he expects, and his grandmother makes all the wrong assumptions.

“He doesn't return your feelings? Oh, my poor Carlos-”

Cougar shakes his head frantically. This may not be the conversation he was originally dreading, but it still rates a close second.

“Did you never tell him?” She asks in disbelief, and when Cougar shakes his head again, she throws her hands up in exasperation. “But Carlos, you _must_ tell him!”

“No,” Cougar says firmly. He will not inflict that embarrassment on Jensen ( _or himself_ , says a nasty little voice in the back of his head.)

“He is not gay?” Sra. Alvarez asks, and then continues before Cougar can answer, “maybe he is flexible about these things – isn't that the fashion with young people these days?”

Cougar starts to laugh, though it very quickly turns into something breathless and choking. _Hysteria_ , a rational of his mind observes with clinical detachment, even as he curls in on himself, hands in his hair and head between his knees. 

There are certain things Cougar has, for a very long time, accepted as truths: that he would never go home. That he would die young and unmourned on some foreign soil. That he would never, ever tell anyone about the way he looked at men as well as woman, and as a corollary truth, that Jake Jensen was his teammate, and would never be anything more than Cougar's friend.

That Cougar would tell his grandmother, of all people, about being in love with a man is so patently absurd that the possibility never even crossed his mind. Cougar is still waiting for her to have a change of heart and tell him he is going to Hell; or for a superior officer to appear out of nowhere and call him a disgrace. With the evening he has been having, the latter would hardly even come as a surprise.

All that happens is his grandmother resting one bony hand on his shoulder as she slowly sits down next to him on the stairs. Cougar gets a hold on his emotions after a few moments, and breathes steadily until it no longer feels like anything might topple him back over the edge into hysteria. 

“You will hurt yourself, sitting like that,” he says, finally.

His grandmother raises one eyebrow. “You will hurt yourself, going on the way you have been,” she says, quite serious. “You must tell him, _mi'jo_.”

Cougar shakes his head. “This is better-” he starts, and jumps when his grandmother swats him over the head. 

“That is not your decision to make,” she says tartly. “You will tell him, because,” she holds up a finger in warning when Cougar opens his mouth to object, “it is your grandmother's dying wish that you do so.” She sits back triumphantly, and Cougar knows he should resent her emotional manipulation, but at that moment he can't muster up enough energy to care. 

He nods, instead.

“You must promise to tell him.”

Cougar sighs, closes his eyes. “I promise.”

His grandmother pokes him in the ribs, and make a little _go on_ motion when he looks at her.

“I promise to tell Jensen,” Cougar says, and rolls his eyes.

She nods, satisfied. “Good.” 

They sit in silence as the sky fades from orange to pale blue, and the first stars begin to appear.

“You were right,” Sra. Alvarez says after a while. “My old bones don't like these steps.”

Cougar helps her up, and walks with her to her bedroom, where she stops him with a hand on his arm.

“You will be here in the morning?” She asks, a little anxiously, as she looks searchingly up at him. _You will not leave?_ hangs unspoken in the air between them.

“Yes, grandmother,” Cougar says, and hugs her. “I will be here.”

\---

What Cougar privately thinks of as The Conversation (capitalization courtesy of Jensen and his habit of over-dramatizing things) occurs on a Friday night. On Saturday, by mutual unspoken accord, they speak no more of the matter, and each goes about their day as usual.

On Sunday, Cougar drives María and his grandmother to the local church for Mass. Cougar has been no stranger to churches – they are places of peace and absolution, where Cougar can lay his nightmares to rest in the myrrh-scented silence – but it is uncomfortable and strange to sit through the full liturgy. He sits in the furthest-back pew, away from the old women, and doesn't go up to receive the Eucharist. He bears too much sin for that. 

Monday is his grandmother's bi-weekly doctor's appointment, so Cougar drives her into the city and gathers curious looks as he sits in the waiting room and reads a magazine. Afterward, they go to eat dinner with Luz. In between relaying to Sra. Alvarez gossip about family members Cougar has never met, she serves squash flower soup so delicious even Cougar feels moved to remark upon it. After dinner, Sra. Alvarez follows Luz into her kitchen, returning with a triumphant smile that verges on a smirk (Cougar is realizing that he inherited many of his expressions from his grandmother) and a piece of paper, which she tucks carefully into her handbag. They leave soon after – the drive back to the hacienda is not overly long, but the hour is growing late.

“How did you eat when you were in the Army?” Sra. Alvarez says suddenly, as they pull up to a stoplight.

“With a fork,” he replies, curious but wary.

His grandmother raps his knuckles, where his hand rests on the gearshift. Cougar jerks back in surprise, then scowls at her. She looks back and very deliberately raises one eyebrow.

Cougar sighs. “MREs,” he says, “or restaurants. Sometimes the base mess hall.”

His grandmother clucks in disapproval, then says, “You must learn to cook.”

Cougar's silence is eloquent.

“You must win your Jensen over, yes? Every girl knows the way to catch her man is to feed him.”

“I am not a girl,” Cougar says, sidestepping the issue of her unrelenting and unwelcome matchmaking.

“Of course not,” Sra. Alvarez replies tartly, “but you are in love with a man, so the principle is the same.”

“Grandmother-”

“No,” she cuts him off, “I will teach you. María will help, but we will not tell her you are learning for a man.”

Cougar sighs.

“It is good for you to learn this, Carlos. When you cook for someone you love, it is very good. Food is important. It shouldn't be from packets and cans and restaurants. Making something with your own hands, that is love.”

“Yes, grandmother,” Cougar replies dutifully. He thinks she might be a little crazy, but he recognizes that once she has an idea firmly in her head, humoring her is the best path and besides – learning to cook will make her happy. His grandmother has little enough time left, Cougar knows, and he doesn't want to spend it fighting with her.

\---

Cougar enters the kitchen the next morning to find his grandmother already up, and chatting animatedly with María over mugs of _atole_.They turn to look at him as he enters, eyes twinkling with cheerful mischief.

“Ah, Carlos, there you are,” Sra. Alvarez says brightly. “I was just telling María about your girl-”

“Sarah,” Cougar says, playing along automatically. 

“Such a sweet boy,” she says as an aside to María, “thinking I would be upset that he's in love with an atheist.” She shakes her head, and Cougar blinks. It's not an explanation he would have thought of, but it appears to have worked.

“She must be pretty, if she can't cook and she doesn't go to church,” María says sceptically, and then smiles slyly. “What made you fall for this Sarah, eh? Entertain us old women, go on.”

Cougar knows that _always had my back, and kept the silence at bay_ is not an answer that will work in this situation, but his mind balks at describing any part of Jensen as 'pretty' – other positive adjectives, yes, but not 'pretty'.

“She talks all the time,” Cougar starts, and that earns him a chuckle, because one of the first things María had noticed about Cougar was his silence, “and she's always cheerful.” He shrugs. It's a strange feeling to talk about Jensen, even in this roundabout fashion, and stranger still to be pretending he is a girl. “Tall. Smart. She has a nice smile,” he says finally, because it's true – Jensen's smile always cheered Cougar up – and realizes, as the little old ladies begin to laugh, that he is blushing.

A strange feeling, indeed.

\---

As it turns out, teaching Cougar to cook is a subject that occasions much good-natured bickering between María and Sra. Alvarez. They spend many hours engaged in friendly debate over recipes and technique, followed by many more hours spent comparing notes. In the end, they circle right back around to the beginning, quite literally: First of all, they decide, their reluctant pupil must learn the very basics – like chopping vegetables.

Cougar raises one very skeptical eyebrow when he hears the plan – surely chopping vegetables isn't something one has to _learn_ , simple as it seems – but says nothing. 

“First lesson,” his grandmother says briskly, handing him a small yellow onion and a sharp knife, “nice neat slices, the width of a grain of rice.”

Perhaps, Cougar reflects later, blinking back tears while attempting to cut an onion into something resembling even slices, this is one of those things that only looks easy because the people doing it have years of practice. The onions keeps wobbling and trying to roll away, the knife slides on the skin, and trying to get the slices even in width is trickier than it looks. His grandmother laughs when Cougar sets down the knife halfway through, no longer able to see the onion through the stinging tears, and pats his shoulder.

“You'll get used to it,” she says. “Now pay attention, this is how you do it.”

Cougar wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, and watches as she picks up a second onion, deftly chops off the stem and roots, stands it on one flat end, and slices it in half lengthwise. Instead of fussing with the papery brown skin, she peels the whole outermost layer off – explaining as she does that, “It's tough, anyway,” – then sets each half cut-side down and slices it with alarming speed and accuracy. She finishes the job all without any sign of tears beyond perhaps an extra blink or two.

Even the most commonplace things, like tortillas, are a subject of discussion, which Cougar can't, at first understand. They're tortillas, they're practically as omnipresent as air, and you can buy them in huge bags at the supermarket.

Cougar begins to realize his error as he awkwardly figures out the minor artform of patting out tortillas by hand. The old women watch his fumbling, offering advice and interference in equal measure. It is not, however, until María hauls out a sack of dried corn and a smaller one of powdered lime that Cougar realizes the full magnitude of his foolishness.

María – who has adopted Cougar as a sort of wayward nephew – thinks he should know how to make _masa_ from scratch, from slaking the lime and using it to cook the dried corn into _nixtamal_ , through to grinding the prepared _nixtamal_ with the black stone _mano y metate_. Sra. Alvarez, though she concedes that it is important for Cougar to understand the process, favors a more practical approach and thinks it best to teach Cougar to cook with what he'll be able to find in New Hampshire. In the end, they agree Cougar should make tortillas the long way at least once, and thereafter he can do it whichever way for which he can find the ingredients and patience.

It takes all day – though this is due in part to Cougar's lack of skill – but Cougar is happy to admit the results are the best damn tortillas he has ever eaten.

\---

Cougar hasn't forgotten that his grandmother has cancer, but aside from the doctor's visits it doesn't intrude much into their lives. He is content to let it stay that way, until the morning Sra. Alvarez falls while getting out of bed. Cougar hears her cry and sprints to her room, to find her shaken and lightly bruised, but otherwise physically unharmed. It hurts her spirit, though – pushes her beyond the normal caution of old age, and into fear, a fear of falling so strong that she stops walking. María helps her out of bed in the mornings, and Cougar carries her – to the porch, or the kitchen, or the sitting room, where he tucks her carefully in among the cushions and blankets.

Life goes on, but even before the week is out Cougar knows this is the beginning of the end.

After the fall comes the pain. The doctor prescribes Sra. Alvarez stronger painkillers, which she looks askance at and refuses to take. Cougar weathers her bad moods and increased snappishness, until one afternoon when it hurts just to look at her, sitting straight and proud and obviously in agony.

“You are worse than Clay!” Cougar hisses, flinging his hands up in irritation.

His grandmother looks at him, startled.

Cougar holds out a glass of water and two white pills. “Take them and I'll tell the story.” He feels a little like he is arguing with a six-year-old, and the feeling must be mutual, judging the by his grandmother's look of quiet chagrin. She takes the pills, and by the time Cougar has finished regaling her with stories of Clay failing to take care of himself and generally being a horrible patient, the deep lines pain had engraved into her face have smoothed out.

Sra. Alvarez seems happiest when in the kitchen, telling Cougar what to do, so together they spend hours there. When they aren't cooking, Sra. Alvarez is combing through ancient cookbooks, flipping through collections of recipes – some clipped from newspapers or saved from the backs of boxes, some handwritten on bits of paper – and dictating her favorites to Cougar, who enters them all into his phone. His grandmother tuts at that, and tries to push paper and pen on him, but one side effect of hanging around Jensen for so long is that Cougar has been forcibly converted to the way of technology. He types faster with his thumbs than on a conventional keyboard, and besides – unlike a notebook, the 4GB micro-SD card can easily be popped out of his phone and hidden inside his hatband. Old habits die hard.

\---

It is only after Sra. Alvarez is confined to her bed that Cougar begins to understand what his grandmother meant when she spoke of making food as a labor of love. Her appetite declines with her health, until getting her to eat even half of her food at any meal feels like a victory.

Watching his grandmother slowly fade away is exhausting, draining Cougar's mental resources like few things have ever done. María and Cougar switch off sitting by Sra. Alvarez's bedside, for which Cougar is deeply grateful. When he isn't keeping his grandmother company, Cougar retreats to the kitchen, closes the door to the rest of the house, and turns up the radio until all he can hear is the static-scratchy _musica norteña_ and the clucking of the chickens in the yard outside. In this self-imposed isolation, he cooks.

There is always a pot of broth on the back of the stove these days, fortified with garlic and mild chiles – though it alternates between chicken and beef, depending on Cougar's mood and what's on hand – because broth is one of the few foods Sra. Alvarez can be depended on to finish without coaxing. Cougar has taken to bringing her cups of it at odd intervals between meals. María cooks food enough for the rest of them, leaving Cougar to experiment with whatever catches his eye as he pages through his phone, and through his great-grandmother's own handwritten recipe book, looking for things he thinks might tempt his grandmother's appetite.

Cougar – who has learned from the best – feels no guilt at stooping to a little emotional blackmail of his own. He waits until his grandmother is about to set down her spoon, bowl of _posole_ still half-uneaten, to give her his most winning smile and say, “But grandmother, I made that especially for you.” It invariably works – whatever he brings her, when he points out that he cooked it for her, she will eat another few bites. They are small triumphs; the warmth they inspire in Cougar's chest all out of scale to their magnitude.

But no matter what Cougar cooks, no matter how much he convinces her to eat, Sra. Alvarez continues to fade away. It's a physical change, at first, as she goes from looking merely elderly to looking _old_. The mental changes are harder to deal with – the increasing vagueness about her surroundings, about when and where she is. More than once, Cougar has the feeling that the Carlos his grandmother is speaking to is his grandfather, not him.

Not long before her mind begins to slip, Sra. Alvarez has Cougar call the parish priest to the house. The priest comes that same evening. Cougar sits with them for a few minutes, then nods to the priest and leaves. He knows why the priest is here – to hear his grandmother's last confession, because on her good days Sra. Alvarez knows she is beginning to lose her grasp on the present – and he thinks about how easy it would be to ask the priest to do the same for him.

The words come unbidden to his mind: _Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been..._ And there Cougar stumbles, because it has been years since he last went to confession. In those years he has broken every commandment except the first two – he is reasonably sure he has never taken another god or worshiped false idols – and committed a thousand little sins besides. He could, he thinks, tell the priest that he has killed, deliberately and occasionally with great satisfaction. It would not be hard to find contrition for most of those kills, or for the children whose deaths still haunt him. 

It is recanting his feelings for Jensen that Cougar balks at. He knows the Church deems them a sin, but Cougar does not want to feel guilt for one of the few things that makes him happy. It may be selfish; Cougar doesn't care. He has carried his sins this far, he can carry them a few more years.

\---

The doctor started making house calls when Sra. Alvarez became bed-bound. At the time, he had asked Cougar to sit in, to make sure Cougar knew what was going on. These days, the doctor mostly talks to Cougar, while Sra. Alvarez sleeps, or picks restlessly at the comforter.

One day, the doctor draws Cougar out of the room after finishing the check-up.

“She is doing as well as can be expected,” the doctor says. Cougar thinks this is a polite lie, but keeps his silence. There is no point in arguing. “The pain will get worse, probably very soon. There is nothing we can do now except to make her comfortable.” To that end, he writes a prescription for morphine, and makes a point of showing Cougar the correct dosage. When the doctor departs, he leaves the morphine bottle behind. The doctor was not wrong: Sra Alvarez's pain levels do get worse, sliding rapidly from bad to nearly unbearable.

One morning – a Tuesday, Cougar thinks grimly; he's beginning to hate Tuesdays – when the pain has become so bad that even the pressure of a sheet over her body is almost too much, Cougar realizes that he hasn't actually exchanged a coherent word with his grandmother for over two days. When she is in pain, she cannot hear him, let alone speak, and when she isn't in pain, she is drugged to sleep. She hasn't eaten in almost eighteen hours. Cougar looks down at his grandmother, so small and pale among the sheets, lapsing gradually into sleep as the latest dose of morphine takes effect, and then down at the morphine bottle still in his hands.

It is not a hard decision to make – after all, such a mercy could only be a very small sin compared to all the others he carries. He sits with her until the end, reciting their favorite Psalm, and when Cougar says _for thou art with me_ , it is not God to whom he refers.

He expects to feel grief, but there is nothing but emptiness.


	2. Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope is a dangerous thing.

Jake surfaces gradually from a coding-induced haze, realizing as he does that he is ravenously hungry. He checks the time – it's eleven minutes past eight PM, which explains the hunger. He ate the last Pop-Tarts for breakfast, and that had been just past noon. He glances over the code before he commits, and then it's time for food, before he passes out from low blood sugar.

The refrigerator is empty but for mustard, half a jar of dill pickle spears, and the very off remains of a half-gallon of milk. The milk goes in the trash, and Jensen contemplatively munches a pickle spear while investigating the kitchen. There is a heel of bread on the counter, so stale that it _clonks_ when he knocks it against the Formica, and a forgotten box of Frosted Mini Wheats wedged into the corner of one cupboard. Jensen eats the Mini Wheats dry, while leaning against the counter.

Rebecca keeps mentioning their spare bedroom, in the vain hope that Jensen will take the hint already and move back in. Jensen loves his sister, but he got over the whole living at home thing years ago, except for a brief relapse after being exonerated for the whole Max fiasco, and he has no desire to move back in. Occasionally, though, he thinks she might have a point – like when he finds himself eating dry cereal for technically lunch (or possibly dinner, or maybe Jensen will just play it safe and go with second meal) because he keeps forgetting to go grocery shopping and he's too hungry to wait for takeout. Jensen digs around in the box for another handful of cereal, and stares moodily across his apartment, which isn't loft-style so much as a literal loft, with sloping ceilings and an abominable lack of anything like ventilation or insulation. It's still mostly empty – his computer desk in one corner, the lights on his tower flashing slow and comforting, little blue beacons proclaiming _all is well_. He has a big flatscreen TV he never uses, in front of the couch Rebecca had insisted on buying him, and an X-Box and PS3 he'll use for testing when he finally gets to the stage where he can start porting his game to other platforms. One corner of the space is halfway screened off (the designers had been going for artistically Japonesque, but only achieved tacky generic Asian), and that's where his bed is: a futon on the floor, currently more of a blanket nest than anything, with his laptop peeking out from under a comforter. It's not home, really – just a place to store his meatsuit – but it's dry and mostly vermin-free, with hot running water, reliable electricity, and cable internet. The cable is provided by Comcast, which is another strike against the apartment, but it's still better than trying to coax a satellite connection into being in the middle of a sandstorm. That's one thing Jensen can say for the Army – it drastically lowered his expectations as far as habitation is concerned. 

The loft was lonely, which for a while had been nice, when the loneliness had felt like welcome solitude. Now it just feels like being alone, and that sucks. Jensen misses his team. He misses Clay and his terrible taste in women; misses Pooch's sense of humor; misses Aisha, which Jensen had never thought could happen until suddenly it did; even misses Roque, the traitorous rat-bastard. Jensen tries not to think about that. Most of all, though, he misses Cougar, and not just because Cougar was unfairly hot and made Jensen want to lick him. Cougar is – or perhaps had been, but Jensen really hopes not – Jensen's best friend. Jensen would cheerfully have given his life for any of his teammates, and he trusted them to feel the same, but Cougar had been special. Cougar had his back, Cougar had laughed at Jensen's jokes – and Jensen, too, pretty frequently, but it hadn't been mean spirited – and alright, he had also stolen ninety percent of the girls Jensen had expressed interest in, but that was kind of their thing, too. Cougar didn't do that to any of the other guys.

So when Cougar had up and disappeared, had said _no thanks_ to Jensen's offer of a place to crash and stopped answering Jensen's texts, or calls, or emails – that had _sucked_ , especially after being burned by Roque. Jensen wishes he knew what happened, whether he had fucked up somehow or whether it was all on Cougar. He's not sure which option is worse – at least if he has screwed up he could apologize, if he ever sees Cougar again. Mostly, Jensen wants to know that Cougar is okay, not depressed and drunk out of his mind in some cheap dive, or a hitman for the cartels, or something equally awful. Jensen has an active imagination, and six months of radio silence in which to come up with increasingly terrible scenarios to explain Cougar's continued absence.

It's his gloomy mood, plus his highly-developed paranoia, that makes Jensen reach for the gun in the cutlery drawer when someone knocks on the door. He hasn't ordered anything, and the cute girl from two floors down always knocks in a particular rhythm.

“Who's there?” Jensen shouts.

“Me,” the knocker says, slightly muffled and completely unhelpful, and then continues, “Cougar.”

Which is how Jensen opens the door with a gun in his hand and a scowl on his face.

“What the _fuck_ , man? Where have you been?”

“México,” Cougar replies, as laconic as ever. He raises one eyebrow and nods towards the gun.

“Yeah, well, I wasn't expecting you because you never replied to any of my emails, which I'm assuming you read, since you know my address. Asshole,” Jensen adds, because if he doesn't keep his anger going, he is probably going to do something supremely embarrassing, like cry.

Cougar bows his head in contrition, and his voice is serious when he says, “Forgive me.”

“Oh, stop that,” Jensen replies. When Cougar continues looking downcast, Jensen sighs. “Yes, of course you're forgiven,” he grumbles, ejecting the magazine from the Beretta and using that as an excuse to look away. “You just scared me, pulling your magical disappearing act. Now are you gonna come in, or are we going to stand in the hallway all night? Because I'm still kinda hungry, and I was thinking Korean sounded good, but it closes soon-”

Cougar cuts him off by hugging him, which is pretty unexpected but not completely without precedent – there had been the time everyone had left Jensen for dead, the bastards, and Jensen had shown them that underestimating him is something only dead idiots do. After that he had received a pretty bone-crushing hug from Cougar.

“You scared me,” Jensen repeats, muttering into Cougar's hair. “Bastard,” he adds fondly, wrapping his arms around Cougar's shoulders and squeezing so Cougar can't mistake his meaning.

Cougar laughs. “ _Mil disculpas_ ,” he says, but he sounds more like himself now, less serious and more sly.

Cougar, as it turns out, has one duffel bag, which he leaves next to the couch, and a box that he carries up from the beat-up old truck with California license plates now parked in front of Jensen's building, and sets in Jensen's kitchen.

“Korean?” Cougar asks when he has finished this minimal amount of moving.

“Hell yeah,” Jensen replies. “If we leave now we'll get there just in time to be the annoying guys ordering five minutes before closing.” 

Jensen still doesn't know _why_ Cougar went AWOL in the first place, but explanations can wait. Contrary to all expectations, Jensen is, in actual fact, capable of patience. He has Cougar back, and that means Jensen can wait, and not let Cougar out of his sight for more than the absolute minimum amount of time – because patience be damned, Jensen is sure as hell not letting Cougar pull another ninja disappearing trick.

\---

It's almost disheartening, in a strange, backwards way, how swiftly they settle back into routine – as easily as though Cougar had never left, and he begins to wonder if it was foolish of him to think that just because _he_ had changed, that the world would change in response.

They go out to get Korean food. Just as Jensen predicted, they arrive five minutes before closing and get glared at by the middle-aged lady working the cash register. Jensen orders enough food for three people, eats it all in the time it takes Cougar to finish his own food, and then spends the next three hours whining about feeling like he's about to die.

It's disturbingly familiar.

That night, Cougar falls asleep on the couch, wrapped in a blanket that smells like Jensen. He wonders, in the long moments between full wakefulness and sleep, what he is doing.

Jensen's kitchen – well, the kindest thing Cougar can say about the kitchen is that it isn't. Isn't a kitchen, certainly. Isn't organized. Isn't terribly clean, which requires a certain amount of skill, seeing as there really isn't enough in it to make a mess.

The cutlery drawer contains three spoons, a solitary fork, a KA-BAR Jensen has apparently been using as a steak knife, and the Beretta. He doesn't own a cutting board or a dish towel, though there is a sponge in the sink, and the dishwasher, which Jensen has been using as a dish drying rack, is also home to a rather large spider that has built a complex web in the bottom right corner. Jensen has three bowls, two of which match, and two plates, which neither match each other nor any of the bowls. He does, however, have a complete set of plastic Avengers tumblers. There is mustard in the refrigerator, an empty pickle jar in the sink, and a very sad, forgotten fern sitting on the windowsill above, slowly dying from neglect.

Cougar waters the fern, first. Then he evicts the dishwasher spider, trapping it in the empty pickle jar (Cougar has spent enough time around Jensen to know that he frequently forms nonsensical attachments to the strangest things, and Cougar really doesn't want to start this operation by killing Jensen's pet spider.) Then he sits down and starts making lists: lists of everything he will need to buy to be able to cook; lists of recipes, with attached sub-lists of ingredients. In the end he has a two lists: essential kitchen items, and groceries.

It takes three minutes of saying Jensen's name and pelting him with balls of wadded-up paper before he jerks, blinking at his monitors like he's coming out of a trance.

“What?” He asks, irritated. “I was in my groove. My coding groove.”

“Food,” Cougar says, holding up the list.

“Oooh, get more Pop-Tarts, the blueberry ones. Oh, and cupcake, if they have 'em, I've been wanting to try those.”

Cougar makes a note, and then, because he's curious about what's been eating Jensen's attention for hours at a time, steps closer. “What are you working on?”

“It's a game,” Jensen says, spinning his chair around and reaching for the mouse. “Here, let me show you.” His main monitor is taken up by a window full of code, and the left monitor has his music, a handful of IRC windows, and two newsfeeds lurking in the background. Jensen launches a new window on the right monitor, maximizes it, then scoots over and waves Cougar closer. On the screen, there's a brightly colored pixelated jungle, with instructions to press Enter to proceed. “Someday I'll have an actual title there, but first I have to think of one that doesn't suck,” Jensen says cheerfully, hitting Enter. A flight of macaws explodes out of the trees, the flashing red and blue of their wings wiping across the screen. When they disappear, the screen is clear of text, and there's a little human figure seated at the base of a large tree, what might be a pixel-art rifle propped next to it, hat pulled down over its face and little z's floating over it. “That was a bitch to animate, by the way,” Jensen says, tapping at the keyboard. The little figure stands up, shouldering its rifle and adjusting its hat with a very familiar motion. 

Cougar looks at Jensen and raises an eyebrow.

Jensen runs a hand over the back of his head. “So, I may kind of have made the main character a hot chick version of you?” Jensen says, blushing.

Cougar looks back at the screen. The little figure, who is now leaning against the tree and occasionally blinking, does indeed have what could be interpreted as breasts. She's wearing dark pants and a white shirt that looks like one of Cougar's old favorites, and when Jensen makes her walk around, there's a long ponytail streaming out behind her. Cougar is not sure what to make of this – it's amusing, certainly, and the 'hot' part should be a good sign – but then again, Jensen had said 'hot chick', so maybe it's not such a good thing, after all.

“What happens?” He asks. Good sign or no, he finds that he's already curiously fond of this little pixel version of himself.

“Well, you play the game. I wanted to make a 2D side-scroller, kind of like the old Metroidvania games, because those were awesome and there's never been a good two player version, but-” Jensen breaks off and looks at Cougar. “That doesn't mean anything to you, does it?”

Cougar shakes his head.

Jensen sighs. “Yeah, I didn't think so. You run around and fight monsters, and pick up loot, and the ultimate baddies might kinda look like Max and his buddies, because I derive entirely too much satisfaction from blowing them up, repeatedly. It's still kinda buggy, and I haven't made most of the levels yet, but you can run around in this one and fight howler monkeys with laser eyes.”

“Two people can play?”

“You _can_ play it with one, but making a two player game was kinda the whole point,” Jensen says, digging around in the mess on his desk before locating what Cougar dimly recognizes as some kind of game controller. He plugs it into his computer and hands it to Cougar. “Here, take the X-Box controller, that's probably easier than the keyboard. Uh, you run with the D-pad – that's this thing here - and press A to shoot. I'll explain aiming after I get Player 2 into the game.”

Cougar makes the little figure – his avatar, he recalls from one of Jensen's long ago explanations – run around the screen. He shoots at nothing and admires the accuracy with which Jensen has rendered the firing animation.

“Here we go, just gotta relaunch the game,” Jensen says, and the launch screen reappears. This time, after the macaws wipe away the text, there's two figures: the girl-Cougar, asleep against the tree, and a another girl with a bright pink shirt, round green glasses, and short blonde hair. The blonde girl nudges the sleeping girl-Cougar, and a speech bubble appears above her head, saying, “Wake up, sleepy head!” There's a little pink heart after the words.

Cougar bursts out laughing. Apparently he didn't need to be worried about the 'chick' part, after all.

“Oh my God,” Jensen groans, burying his face in his hands, “I _completely_ forgot I had done that. It seemed funny at four in the morning. Christ. I'll just get rid of that, and we can pretend it never happened, right?” His ears are bright red. 

“Keep it,” Cougar says, bumping their shoulders together, and when Jensen looks up in surprise, Cougar grins. “It's cute.”

Jensen blinks. “I don't think you've ever used that word before. Seriously, my worldview is shattered, Cougar said 'cute'. Better watch out, your manly image is in danger.”

Cougar rolls his eyes and holds up the game controller. “How do you play?”

“Okay,” Jensen says, eyes lighting up as he warms instantly to the subject of explaining videogames, “the balance is still kinda sketchy, but the idea is that the characters are supposed to work as a team. Your lady – I've been calling her Cat, real creative, I know, but whatever – is better at ranged attacks, while Jay is a tank – er, that's like, a character who deals a whole lot of damage at once, but her accuracy is shit.”

Cougar listens, nodding at appropriate moments and occasionally asking questions.

He never does manage to go grocery shopping, but after two hours he's finally got the hang of aiming. It's surprisingly fun, especially when they finish the level – Cougar takes out a whole group of laser-eyed howler monkeys, while Jensen tanks the tapir with rocket launchers, and then Jensen whoops with glee.

“Come on, Cougs, that was great! You're not hype enough, you gotta get hype! We're awesome! Go team us!”

Cougar laughs at him. Life is maybe, finally, looking up.

\---

A few days after Cougar's unexpected arrival, Jensen wakes up to an empty apartment. His incipient panic attack is staved off by the sticky note on his main monitor, and Cougar's duffel bag still sitting by the end of the couch. The note says only _on errands_ , because Cougar's monosyllabic tendencies extend to written communications as well. It's enough, though.

Cougar gets back around three in the afternoon, laden down with bags of kitchen utensils, tacos, and a six-pack of Jensen's favorite beer.

“Why the pots and pans?” Jensen asks in growing bewilderment as Cougar methodically unpacks everything onto the kitchen counter. Cougar has bought a dish drainer – a _dish drainer_. It's so mundane as to be mind-boggling.

“To cook,” Cougar says, offering Jensen a beer.

“You cook now?” Jensen is truly confused, because the most elaborate he has ever seen Cougar get in the cooking department was scrambling eggs in the microwave, and then drowning the resulting mess in salsa.

“A little,” Cougar replies, and hands Jensen his share of the food.

“I just watched you unload half a restaurant kitchen onto my counters, and you say a little?”

Cougar shrugs.

“What, were the last six months some kind of ninja kitchen training? Did you travel to a remote monastery and study under cooking monks? Can you kill someone with a spatula, now? Actually, that would be pretty cool, and, heh, it gives a whole new meaning to 'dispatching' someone.”

Cougar gets the secretive smile that means he is laughing at something no one else knows, and shrugs again.

“Pretty much.”

So apparently, sometime in the last few months, Jensen had forgotten how irritatingly closed-mouthed his best friend is. Jensen bounces a balled-up bit of tinfoil off Cougar's head in retaliation.

The next few days pass in similar fashion: Jensen wakes up to cryptic messages on his monitors, and Cougar returns mid-afternoon with bags of stuff. Very soon, there is more food in the apartment than there has ever been before, and surprisingly little of it is toaster pastries or instant microwave dinners.

Then the actual cooking starts, and Jensen begins to wonder if her's fallen into an alternate dimension, because not only is Cougar in his kitchen, _cooking_ , but the food is good. Scratch that, the food is fucking _delicious_ , and Jensen has no idea what he's done to deserve this. It's enough to give him a raging case of paranoia - _why is Cougar cooking for him?_

In his crazier moments – usually when he wanders into the kitchen at some ungodly hour of the morning and finds his fridge full of tasty leftovers, as though he has accidentally stumbled into a universe where Cougar is a Stepford husband – Jensen will start wondering what terrible thing is going to happen to even out his luck. Is Cougar dying, and this is his way of softening the blow when he finally tells Jensen? Only that doesn't make sense, because Jensen is pretty sure that if Cougar were dying, he would still be off in Mexico, picking up all the pretty girls and spending as much time as possible at the beach. Jensen wouldn't mind being one of those girls, though the beach part would have to be negotiable, since Jensen sunburns in about thirty seconds flat, and sunscreen, despite what people may think, is not sexy at all – and that's usually when Jensen cuts that train of though short, because it's not a good path to go down.

Then there are the days – equally perplexing – when Jensen will take a break from the endless coding and wander into the kitchen, only to find Cougar throwing a very quiet fit (there is really no other word for it) at some inanimate object.

The first time it happens, Cougar turns to Jensen and says, “Your stove is electric.”

“Um,” Jensen says, assessing the situation and deciding to proceed with extreme caution, “yes?”

“It's terrible,” Cougar hisses, and stalks out of the room.

“Alrighty then,” Jensen says to the empty kitchen. “Duly noted: electric stoves are bad.”

\---

It takes some time for Cougar to adjust to this new life. Remembering how to live with Jensen isn't hard, as that became second nature years ago: make sure he remembers his gun, make sure he remembers to sleep, make sure he remembers to eat – only now it's not mission critical so much as critical to keeping Jensen from killing himself with a steady diet of Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew and thirty-six hour coding sprees. Cougar feeds Jensen, and hides the soda when Jensen hits eighteen hours spent in front of a computer. Sometimes Cougar even forces Jensen to get some sun, grabbing a six pack and climbing through the bathroom window out onto to the roof, where the sky is wide and the city seems far away.

It's the strangest things that throw Cougar off: the electric stove that means he can't use a clay _comal_ ; the pale, tasteless factory chicken at the supermarket; the way it takes him days, at times, to find ingredients he took for granted living at the hacienda. Cougar perseveres, bides his time, watches Jensen – _really_ watches him – and starts to think maybe his grandmother wasn't quite so crazy after all. 

The emotional numbness, the sense of floating one step outside his body that has dogged his steps ever since Max's death, becomes an unexpected strength. The waiting game is a familiar one, but the fear of what failure this time might bring is muted and distant.

One morning, when waking up on Jensen's couch has become routine, Cougar opens his eyes and thinks, _Yes. Today._

Cougar takes a quick inventory of the kitchen, then thinks while he's taking a shower. There is plenty of food in the apartment, so he has a multitude of options, but he wants to do something with the poblanos he found at the farmer's market. By the time Cougar is toweling his hair dry, he has decided to make _chiles rellenos_ , with _papas_ (which are, according to Jensen, their own magical food group, comprised of crispy, spicy, deliciousness – it confuses Cougar a little, as they're just potatoes, not something special) and the requisite beans and tortillas. It will keep him pleasantly busy in the kitchen – too busy, hopefully, to second-guess himself.

\---

Saying Jensen doesn't expect Cougar to kiss him is rather like saying he doesn't expect aliens to land on the White House lawn on Tuesday – completely outside the realm of probability, but amusing to imagine nonetheless – but Cougar kisses him, so maybe Jensen ought to start making “Greetings, alien overlords” signs, just in case.

Truthfully, he hadn't expected any of this – hadn't expected Cougar to show up at his door, not after the way Cougar had disappeared (and hadn't _that_ sucked, thinking his best friend had up and deserted him), hadn't expected Cougar to stay, and _really_ hadn't expected the cooking thing. Not that Jensen is complaining, not at all.

To return to the kissing – Jensen had been programming, up until the increasingly delicious smells wafting out from the kitchen area had driven him to abandon the problem of sound integration (which was driving him slowly crazy, because FMOD was a stone bitch) and go bother Cougar, complaining of culinary torture. Dinner had been even better than usual, which was saying something. It also meant Jensen had been even more vocal in his compliments than usual. There may have been mentions of orgasms in his mouth; Jensen can neither confirm nor deny – he maintains that a man cannot be held responsible for anything he says while under the influence of _chiles rellenos_. 

Jensen, whatever some people might insinuate, had not been raised in a barn, or by wolves; so after dinner he had gathered up the dirty dishes and washed them, without prompting or complaint. He had pulled the plug on the sink, rinsed the soap off his hands, and said, “Hey Cougar, do we have a dish towel?” He had then turned around to find Cougar standing about six inches behind him. “Jesus fuck, you surprised me.”

Which brought them just about to the present moment, and the kissing. Cougar steps minutely closer, and Jensen realizes he can't back up any further because his ass is pressed up against the sink. 

Cougar reaches up, runs one hand over the side of Jensen's face, over his ear, tentative fingers curling around the back of Jensen's skull. He leans in, eyes on Jensen's, until their faces are so close it's hard to focus on Cougar's features – and then he stops.

So maybe the alien welcome posters were a little premature.

“Oh, you cannot _possibly_ blame me for coming to this conclusion,” Jensen mutters, which makes Cougar's lips turn up at the corners, and then Jensen leans the rest of the way in and kisses that smile.

There's soapy dishwater soaking through the seat of his jeans, and he still hasn't dried his hands (though that's actually a plus, because leaving damp handprints on Cougar's ass is deeply satisfying), but Jensen is far too busy enjoying himself to care. 

“That was unexpected,” Jensen says when Cougar pulls back, hand sliding down Jensen's neck to rest on his shoulder. Cougar's expression clouds, and Jensen hastens to add, “But totally cool. More than cool. Awesome? Spectacular. I'm running out of superlatives here, but that was pretty much all of them. We can do that again, right?”

Cougar, thank God and all the little fishes (as Jensen's mother used to say when she was in one of her good moods), chuckles and kisses Jensen, catching Jensen's lower lip between his teeth and biting – not hard enough to hurt, just enough to feel – and _hell_ yes, Jensen is on board with that. They're still standing in the kitchen, though, and the smell of cooking grease and dishsoap isn't very high on the list of romantic aromas (number one on that list goes to the mingled scents of leather and hot metal, which Jensen is man enough to admit is because his thing for Cougar is less of a passing fancy and more of a terminal condition), so he decides a change of location is in order. It's probably premature to go for the bed, and besides, the bed is on the far end of the loft; which leaves the couch the clear contender for their relocation. Jensen leaves off groping Cougar's ass in favor of grabbing his hips (which, while more than mildly distracting, don't sway Jensen from his initial objective) and walking them out of the kitchen area.

“Couch,” Jensen says succinctly in answer to Cougar's raised eyebrow.

The couch is _much_ better than standing in the kitchen with soapy water soaking through his jeans, especially since when Jensen drops down onto the cushions, he somehow ends up with Cougar in his lap. Cougar is warmth and the comforting solidity of muscle, his mouth hot and strands of his hair escaping to brush, cool and satiny-soft, across Jensen's face and neck. Jensen finds himself fascinated by the dip of Cougar's spine, where flexing muscle gives way to warm skin over prominent bone; it calls to him, this groove that seems made for his fingers to slide along, to dig in and hold. The second or third time Jensen gets hair in his mouth, he gives in to temptation and fumbles at Cougar's hair tie. Cougar bats his hands away, leaning back with a lazy grin. He stretches, deliberately arching his back and smirking at Jensen's stunned expression. Cougar's hair falls free, and he slips the hair tie onto his wrist with a movement that seems unconscious in its practiced ease, before leaning down and bumping their foreheads together. His hair makes dark curtains on either side of their faces, shutting out the outside world. Jensen grins, sudden fondness overwhelming him.

“Hi,” he says.

Cougar makes a noise that isn't quite a laugh, and smiles. “Hello.” 

He sits back and carefully removes Jensen's glasses – already hopelessly smudged, not that Jensen really cares – and then looks around, at a loss as to where to put them. Jensen takes his glasses, folds them up, and drops them over the end of the couch onto Cougar's duffel. Then, feeling greatly daring, Jensen slides his hands into Cougar's hair, catching the strands between his fingers, tugging Cougar's face back down until Jensen can stretch and mouth at the corner of Cougar's jaw. Cougar makes a noise – a choked off moan – and moves with an ease that puts ideas into Jensen's head. 

Because Jensen's brain _hates_ him, it chooses that moment to suddenly solve the FMOD integration bug that has been driving him up the wall for the last three days.

“ _Shit_ ,” Jensen mutters with feeling as he realizes his cellphone is hanging out on his desk, across the room. “Alright. Stopping is the last thing I want to do right now, but I just figured out the solution to a thing that I've been working on for days, and if I don't get it written down right now I'm going to forget, and my phone is all the way across the room, so can I borrow yours? Or, do we have any Post-Its around here? A Sharpie? I could write it on my arm, I've done that before.”

Cougar, who has been watching Jensen with an inscrutable look on his face, starts to chuckle. He rolls off Jensen and collapses next to him on the couch, still laughing.

“Go,” he says, waving towards Jensen's desk. 

“Really?”

Cougar nods, eyes still twinkling with mirth.

“Okay, but,” Jensen stops two steps away from the couch to point at Cougar, “we're not done here, you got that? As soon as I've got this down, we're picking up where we left off.”

Cougar's look conveys quite clearly that of course they are, and furthermore, Jensen is an idiot.

\---

Jensen wakes up at 2:17AM, which he knows because the bottom right corner of his main screen is the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes. He has fallen asleep on his keyboard again, which is both uncomfortable and annoying, since he's pretty sure there was something else he was supposed to be doing -

Oh right. Making out with Cougar. Jensen smiles, and he knows it's one of his goofier smiles, but he really doesn't care, not with the prospect of resumed makeouts somewhere in the near future.

The loft is chilly – it's an old building, and the initial builders had been a little vague on the concept of insulation – and Jensen is just beginning to be conscious enough of his surroundings to wonder why he isn't cold, when he sits up and realizes there is a blanket over his shoulders. Jensen peers at it, a strange feeling coalescing behind his sternum, crowding his lungs and making it hard to breathe. The blanket isn't one that Jensen recognizes, and he couldn't forget something this awesome: it's handmade (knitted or crocheted or, hell, for all Jensen knows maybe you forge blankets – the point being, someone put a lot of time and effort into making balls of yarn into something useful), and even by the pale light of his monitors he can tell it's brightly colored, all pink and green and blue and, in short, totally awesome. Jensen pulls the blanket closer around his shoulders and shuffles blearily toward the couch, where Cougar is, unsurprisingly, asleep. Jensen flops down cross-legged on the floor, contemplating the little frown on Cougar's sleeping face, and wondering whether waking him up is worth the probable violence. He decides against it, regretfully, and leaves a note stuck to Cougar's hat instead.

\---

Cougar wakes up punctually at 5:30, when the sky outside is just beginning to lighten to grey. Jensen's screens are dark, his computer chair empty, and Cougar is about to roll over and go back to sleep when he notices the sticky note on his hat.

 _Stop being polite_ , it reads, _I want you in my bed by 0800, soldier. ;)_

Cougar smiles at the ceiling, then goes to kick Jensen's futon until he wakes up. Jensen grumbles wordlessly and burrows deeper into the blankets. Cougar kicks the futon again and Jensen flails, glaring groggily in Cougar's direction. 

“I outrank you,” Cougar says, flicking the sticky note at Jensen's face. “Outranked,” he corrects himself.

Jensen blinks, then smiles, sleepy and open. “Sassing a superior officer,” he mumbles, stretching in a way that might be deliberate. “I'm ready to receive my punishment. My sexy-” Jensen interrupts himself with a yawn- “sexy punishment.”

“Go back to sleep,” Cougar replies – mostly, he will admit, to see Jensen's reaction. He's expecting a displeased scowl, and not so much for Jensen to go for the knees, toppling Cougar into the bed.

“Victory is – ow, elbows – mine!” Jensen crows, rolling over and wrapping himself – and by extension, the blankets – around Cougar.

Jensen is snoring softly within five minutes, but it takes Cougar longer to get back to sleep, and even then he doesn't manage more than a doze. He has very rarely shared a bed with with someone, for many reasons, and it's strange – not unpleasant, but different – to lie in bed with another body warm and present next to his. It's something Cougar thinks he might be able to get used to.

Very little about their routine changes, when they start sleeping together, and then again when they start not sleeping quite so much. Jensen starts keeping slightly more regular hours, as a function of wanting to be awake at the same time as Cougar. Cougar, for his part, very quickly figures out when Jensen is working and can't be disturbed, and when he is working but amenable to being distracted, dragged off, and debauched. Once again Cougar is left feeling slightly wrong-footed by the ease of the transition, as though a change so fundamental should generate more outward conflict.

\---

Jensen's phone rings at ten past six, one Monday morning, jolting both of them out of a sound sleep, the ring tone Clay's.

“Yessir?” Jensen answers, still half-asleep, searching blindly for his glasses. He knows it doesn't make sense, wanting glasses when he's on the phone, but being able to see makes him more ready to face the world.

“Take it I woke you up,” Clay says, sounding perversely cheerful. 

“Hate to break it to you, but normal people are asleep right now,” Jensen grumbles. He flashes a grin of thanks at Cougar when Cougar hands him his glasses, and puts them on one-handed as he continues, “and while I may not be normal, I was up until, oh, about five hours ago.”

“Used to be five hours was a good night's sleep. Getting soft?”

“Just catching up on a sleep deficit the size of your ego, sir,” Jensen replies cheerfully. Clay's chuckle is a gravelly thing, and swiftly gone. “Why are you calling, anyway? Not that it's not lovely to hear your dulcet tones, but you don't usually wake me up to murmur sweet nothings.”

“I've got a job opportunity for you,” Clay says, “and Cougar, if I can find him. You know where he is?”

Jensen blinks, then turns to Cougar and mouths _Clay_. Cougar nods.

“As a matter of fact,” Jensen says into the phone, “I do.” He leaves out the part where they are both mostly naked and in bed together.

“Tell him to call me.”

“Or I could put you on speakerphone. He's here.”

“At six in the morning?” Clay asks, and Jensen can tell he's smirking, damn him.

“We're-” Jensen says, and then stops, because _sleeping together_ is exactly what he doesn't want to say – at least not until he has had a chance to corner Cougar and figure out what, exactly, they have going on – so instead he continues lamely, “he's been crashing at my place. Also, you're on speakerphone now.”

“Hey Boss,” Cougar says, as calmly as though he isn't in Jensen's bed, wearing Jensen's shirt, with his hair going every which way, and curiously poking at a bruise on Jensen's thigh in the shape of his teeth. Jensen smacks his hand away, and Cougar smirks in response.

“Cougar,” Clay says. “Good to hear you're not dead.”

“Now that we're done with the outpouring of emotion, what's this about a job?” Jensen has been living off sales of _Zombie Fratboy Apocalypse_ , his first game (released for iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile), sales which have begun to slow in recent months. 

“Aisha has a friend-”

“I didn't think she had friends,” Jensen interrupts, “minions, maybe. People she doesn't kill.”

“Jensen, shut up,” Clay says, and continues, “Aisha has a friend, just graduated from Harvard with an MBA, and found out the job market isn't so great when you're wearing a headscarf. I've been thinking for a while now that no one's filled the niche left by Kryon, after they went belly-up from the whole Max thing.”

“So,” Jensen says, drawing the syllable out thoughtfully, “you're thinking private-sector security-”

“And military subcontracting.”

“And military subcontracting, okay, but without the whole supporting evil megalomaniac shtick? 'Cause I really can't get behind the evil, that's kind of a dealbreaker. We could do it like Google, put-”

“Don't be evil, yeah, we've all heard you talking about that a thousand times before,” Clay says with a sigh. “But that's the basic idea.”

“What about the dress code?”

“You can wear whatever the hell you want in your office, as long as you're clothed, but when you're meeting with clients you have to look like a professional.”

“Sounds fair enough. Oh hey, you said offices. Where are those gonna be?”

“Really, Jensen? You're more more worried about your clothes than the location?”

“I had to be sure the corporate environment was one I would be comfortable working in,” Jensen replies primly.

“Jolene refuses to move, so you're in luck, we're looking for office space near your area.”

“Well, I think that's it for me. You got any questions, Cougar?”

“Nope.”

“You heard the man. I guess I'm in. You in?” Jensen cocks an eyebrow at Cougar, who nods.

“Yup.”

“We're in.”

“Good to hear it. First meeting's in two weeks. Check your email.”

“Well, now I'm awake,” Jensen says, after Clay has hung up. “You feeling like coffee? Blowjobs? Waffles? All of the above? That's my favorite option, though not all at once, that might get messy – oh hey, I take it that's a yes to-” Jensen is quite happy to take the hint and shut up when Cougar's hand covers his mouth. 

They get around to all three items, though not quite in the order Jensen originally proposed.

\---

Clay's first meeting comes and goes. Less than a month after, Clay is the CEO of his very own company, and Cougar has an office. It's a very boring office, but he still refuses to let Jensen decorate. He has seen the results of allowing Jensen free reign in decorating his own office, and it wasn't pretty. It has been unilaterally decided that Jensen is not allowed to receive clients in his office, lest they get the wrong impression.

Jensen, who has no compunctions about acting like a couple when he and Cougar are out doing mundane things like picking up lunch, has so far shown no inclination to tell their friends about their relationship. Cougar suspects Jensen is laboring under the misguided assumption that Cougar wants it that way. It isn't an unreasonable assumption to make, something for which Cougar feels a little guilty, but it's wrong – he just doesn't know quite how to tell Jensen he is okay with everyone knowing.

Cougar has become uncomfortably aware that he doesn't quite know how to tell Jensen a great number of things. It's worst when Jensen is wrapped around Cougar, fast asleep and half snoring. In those moments, Cougar wants so much to give voice to the depths of his feelings, but even if he could find the words, his courage fails him. He can't shake the notion that if the truth were known, he would no longer be welcome – so he tries to tell Jensen without words, and hopes that he is heard.

\---

With Cougar and a decent job, Jensen's life is suddenly terrifyingly perfect – except for the way they never talk about anything. It's too perfect, is what it is, and Jensen knows he doesn't deserve this kind of happiness: too many black marks in his book, too many evil things done in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. The seeds of doubt, when planted, grow swiftly: Cougar has never said why he is there in Jensen's apartment, Jensen is clearly not deserving of his – well, in short it's a little silly, Jensen thinks, to just assume Cougar loves him. Those rare times when Jensen gets Cougar into bed and then stays awake long enough to see Cougar fall asleep, he lies awake memorizes the lines of Cougar's face and wondering when it's all going to come apart in his hands, like everything else.

When the paranoia gets too much, Jensen corners Pooch in the break room.

“I need you to punch me or something,” Jensen announces. He'll admit it's not his best opening line. 

“Hell no,” Pooch replies, stirring hazelnut non-dairy creamer into his coffee. “Cougar would break my arm.”

“No he wouldn't.”

“Yeah, he would.”

“Fine, be a spoilsport. You're no fun anymore, you know that? I think fatherhood has killed your zest for life.”

“Fatherhood has reminded me I'm mortal, Jay.”

“Same difference. Seriously, I need you to do something to even out my karmic balance. Everything's been going really good recently, and I'm starting to wig out. 'Cause you know my good luck never lasts, so when's everything going to to go FUBAR, right? So I figure I need to bleed off the pressure with little things, before something big comes along and knocks me on my ass.”

“You do know you're batshit crazy, yeah?”

“So that's a yes?”

Pooch rolls his eyes. “I'm gonna regret this.”

In hindsight, the statement is remarkably prescient.

\---

It doesn't take long for Sunday afternoon barbecues at the Porteous house to become a weekly event. They usually run late, and tonight is no exception, the sky fading from pink and orange to dusk's washed-out blue as Cougar and Jensen head slowly to the door, saying their goodbyes.

“What's up?” Jensen asks when Cougar stops, patting down his pockets. “I got the keys, remember?” Jensen jangles the keyring in demonstration.

“Cellphone.”

“I'll call it,” Jensen says, suiting actions to words.

A moment later there's the sound of guitar and keyboard, and then a man's voice belts out _Gay vatos in love._ Pooch starts cackling, and Cougar is ready to join in – looks like the cat is out of the bag ( _or closet_ , he thinks wryly), and he can appreciate a good joke – but he's startled by Jensen knocking over a chair in his haste to flee the scene.

“It wasn't me!” Jensen shrieks from where he's taken shelter behind the kitchen island, waving his phone frantically. “No matter what I may or may not have asked Pooch to do, I never touched your phone, so you can't kill me, alright?”

Cougar blinks, realization dawning slow and horrible – Jensen thinks Cougar is going to be angry over a stupid song. Over the sound of the singer urging his listeners to _stand by their man_ , Cougar steps forward, picks up his phone, and ends the call. Without saying anything, he slips it into his pocket, turns on his heel, and leaves. Failure is a bitter taste in his mouth.

Cougar stays silent on the drive back to the apartment, not so much because he wants to, but because he still doesn't know what to say. Jensen is twitchy but equally silent, which only makes Cougar feel worse, and he's shamefully happy to escape when they finally park in front of the apartment building. He needs to go somewhere alone, to think for a while without any distractions, so he heads for the roof. Oh his way through the apartment, Cougar sees his grandmother's Bible, sitting innocuously on top of his duffel. He picks it up on a whim.

Out on the roof, the air is cool, a little breeze ruffling his hair and blowing away the day's heat. Cougar settles down, stares out across the city until he feels a little better, then looks down at the Bible in his hands. It falls open to the Epistles of Paul, a well-marked and much read page in the middle of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Cougar smiles; his grandmother had held strong opinions on Paul, both good and bad. He runs his fingers down the page, the words so familiar he hardly needs to read them: _Y ahora permanecen la fe, la esperanza y el amor, estos tres; pero el mayor de ellos es el amor._ Cougar stops, looks closer – there's one note in the margin that is darker than those around it, the ink fresh and unfaded. _Acuérdate de esto, mi'jo calladito_ , it reads – _Remember this, my quiet son._

And _oh_ \- 

There is the grief, overwhelming.


	3. Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known._

The drive back to the apartment (which has never felt less like home) is one of the worst Jensen can remember, barring those involving enemy fire or wounded teammates. Cougar sits silently, staring out the passenger side window, and Jensen is too much of a coward to break the silence. He knew the whole not talking about it thing was going to come back and bite him in the ass, but the stupid fucking irony of how it finally went down is a little more than he can handle right now.

Jensen parks the truck outside their building and Cougar is out the door and heading up the stairs almost before Jensen has the key out of the ignition. Jensen sits in the darkened cab a little longer, resting his head against the steering wheel.

“Told you so, you optimistic moron,” he mutters to himself, then sighs and sits up. No point in moping until he knows for sure what's going on. Maybe Cougar just really hates that song, whatever it is.

Jensen scowls at that thought, locking the truck and trudging up the stairs. He thinks it's pretty clear from Cougar's reaction to _gay vatos in love_ what this is all about, and it doesn't surprise him, not really, not with all the cultural baggage Cougar carries around. Jensen knows he isn't much better – the military sure did its best to drill secrecy into him, but at least he doesn't have the added burden of a Catholic upbringing. Jensen just wishes they could have got this out of the way at the beginning, is all – before he had the chance to get even more emotionally invested.

The apartment is empty, but the window in the bathroom is open, so Jensen figures Cougar is out on the roof, sulking. He is going to leave it at that, give Cougar his privacy while Jensen goes and gets as drunk as possible (a difficult task when the only alcohol in the apartment is a couple bottles of beer, but there's a liquor store a block away), when he hears a noise. It takes a moment for Jensen to place the sound, and when he does – holy _shit_.

Cougar is crying. _Cougar_ is _crying_. 

Jensen has the brief, hysterical thought that he would rather jump on a live grenade than deal with Cougar crying, but that isn't true. Still, a grenade is at least a known quantity. Before this moment, if asked Jensen would have claimed Cougar incapable of tears, would have expressed his belief that Cougar had his tear ducts welded shut through sheer manliness. 

He dithers in the bathroom for a good five minutes, caught between wanting to go to Cougar and fear of making a bad situation worse. The night is chilly, though, and that ultimately decides him. Cougar hates the cold – always has, always will, as far as Jensen can tell. He grabs the afghan that Cougar calls 'horrible' (but always with a fond sort of grimace) and Jensen calls 'the best _ever_ , don't be a hater.' Thus armed, Jensen scrambles out the bathroom window and onto the gently sloping roof. Cougar is sitting on the asphalt shingles, hands in his hair and head between his knees. His shoulders shake as Jensen drapes the blanket over him, but he doesn't make a sound. Jensen sits down next to Cougar, leaving space enough between them that there won't be any accidental touching. There's a book on the ground by Cougar's feet, tissue-thin pages fluttering in the night air. Jensen picks it up for lack of anything better to do, and because the dew is beginning to settle and it seems wrong to let a book get damp. He doesn't need to look at the black leather cover to know it's a Bible, with its gilt-edged pages and faded silk ribbons. It looks well-read, the page margins filled with penciled-in notes in a neat, old-fashioned hand. Not Cougar's, then.

Next to him, Cougar moves, hands dropping to hang between his knees, hair still hiding his face.

“My grandmother,” Cougar says after a long moment, one hand coming up to pluck at the edge of the blanket, “she made this. For you.”

“Oh,” Jensen says, for lack of anything else to say. He feels like his brain has stalled, as he tries to figure out where this conversation is going – or where it started, for that matter. “Oh! That video I sent you.”

Cougar sighs. “I took her back to México, so she could die at home. Cancer,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

Jensen doesn't know what to say, so he settles on, “Grief's a bitch, man.”

Cougar continues, “It's a long drive. I told stories. About the team. About you.” Cougar looks up, and Jensen never expected him to cry prettily, but like this, lit only by the glow of the city, his red-rimmed eyes make him look terrifyingly intense. “She knew,” Cougar says, steadily meeting Jensen's gaze, “about you.”

“Oh,” Jensen says again, feeling stupid and for once at a loss for words. “But-” and then the words dry up completely, because that means – that means Cougar has been feeling this whatever-it-is for a while.

“She's the reason I-” Cougar stops, looks back down at the roof. “I'm sorry,” he says finally, sounding miserable.

Jensen has no idea, anymore, what Cougar is apologizing for. He decides to take a chance, scoots closer to Cougar and puts an an arm around his shoulders while he tries to sort through all the words unspoken. Cougar leans into him, which Jensen chooses to interpret as a positive sign.

“She made me promise to tell you. I don't know how,” Cougar says into Jensen's chests. The words are followed by a rough chuckle. Jensen can feel the moment Cougar sobers up by the way the tension creeps back into him.

Enlightenment dawns, swift and glorious, because Cougar's grandmother wouldn't have forced Cougar to tell Jensen he wanted a friends-with-benefits arrangement, right? Last time Jensen had checked, you didn't tell little old grandmothers you wanted to be fuckbuddies with your old Army buddy, because that was just _wrong_.

“I think,” Jensen says slowly, “that we might have been experiencing some communications errors. I've been listening on normal people frequency, right? But you're Cougar, you're not normal. And you've been telling me your way, right?” Jensen doesn't wait for Cougar to answer, instead pulling him closer and kissing the back of his head. Time to go for broke. “I love you too.”

The noise Cougar makes might be a laugh, or a sob, or the bastard lovechild of both. Jensen doesn't give it much thought, more focused on the way Cougar is clutching at his shirt, and, more importantly, that Cougar hasn't punched him yet.

“You know,” Jensen says thoughtfully, “this makes the last couple months make so much more sense. The cooking thing – I did not get the cooking thing. I thought maybe you were dying, or something.”

That startles an actual laugh out of Cougar.

It's a long while later when Jensen says, “So does this mean we can officially move in together, and get an apartment that doesn't suck? Let me tell you, I am getting pretty sick of the fucking plumbing, and I've been thinking it might be cool to have actual windows-”

“No electric stoves,” Cougar says. His face is still hidden, smashed up against Jensen's neck, but Jensen can hear his smile.

“Don't worry, buddy. I give you full veto power over the kitchen.”

Cougar snorts.

A little while after that, Jensen announces, “My ass is asleep. That is seriously weird.”

Cougar stands up, stretching as he goes, and holds a hand out to Jensen. Even with his help, Jensen nearly falls over. They clamber back through the bathroom window, Jensen hovering like an anxious herding dog and not content until they are both safely in bed. Cougar falls asleep unusually swiftly, not that Jensen blames him after the evening they have endured. Only after Cougar is soundly asleep does Jensen dare to move, fishing his cellphone out of the pile of clothes by the bed. He has a missed call and two texts, all from Clay.

**Cougar with you?** says the first text, and **You okay? Need backup?** says the second.

**Cougar's with me. We're good.** Jensen sends back. After a moment, he sends a second text, **Taking a mental health day tomorrow. If Pooch asks let him worry.**

His phone chimes a minute later. **Glad you finally got your heads out of each others asses.**

**Keep that up sir and you'll get DETAILS! :)** Jensen replies, and then turns his phone off without setting an alarm. He finds Cougar's phone and does the same, because Jensen is determined to sleep in. They'll have a nice late morning, and then maybe Jensen can invade Cougar's shower, and after that, between Cougar's cooking skills and the vast resources of the internet, Jensen can probably even get himself pancakes without ever having to leave the house.

Oh yes. Life is looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to all the lovely people on my team, for their cheerleading and general spiffyness. You guys are great.
> 
> Particular thanks to Pistol, for being a sounding board for food stuff, preventing gun!fail, providing TEA, and humoring me through several neurotic author moments. (The tea helped.)
> 
> Finally, thanks to lady_krysis and kisahawklin, for arranging everything, thereby not only giving me an excuse to write this little bit of ridiculousness, but forcing me to finish it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Mole: An adventure in cooking](https://archiveofourown.org/works/499264) by [kisahawklin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin)
  * [A Million Darkened Kitchens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/500491) by [zoronoa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoronoa/pseuds/zoronoa)




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